MORE than 300,000 teenagers are leaving Australian schools about now. Tragically, many of them will be heading straight to Centrelink, joining the hundreds of thousands

of Australians who are unemployed or underemployed.

In recent years, more than 15 per cent of teenage workers have been unable to find jobs and more than 5 per cent of all workers are presently unemployed. The latter figure is about three times the unemployment rate that prevailed throughout the long economic boom that lasted from 1940 until 1970.

It was the Labor government of John Curtin that first made full employment a political mantra and then proceeded to prove that it was possible. How the world has changed.

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Employment Minister Bill Shorten now speaks of 5 per cent unemployment as being the new ''full employment''. At the same time, he presides over a system that denies dignity to unemployed workers who struggle to survive on a government pittance that is designed to punish and shame.

What has happened to the modern Labor Party? How can it be comfortable punishing the unemployed for the plight the government has put them in? And why is the Liberal Party quiescent in this?

For make no mistake about it, the past few decades have seen governments of both persuasions preside over a deliberately created pool of hundreds of thousands of unemployed and underemployed workers.

These hapless workers are the human ammunition that the Reserve Bank keeps ready to deploy against the long-vanquished inflation bogy. If unemployment was ever to fall much below 5 per cent, the bank would quickly increase interest rates to push unemployment back up towards 5 per cent.

It was not always so. In 1972, Labor leader Gough Whitlam attacked the Liberal government of Billy McMahon for causing the unemployment rate to approach 2 per cent. Whitlam's election speech promised that his government's ''first priority will be to restore genuine full employment - without qualification, without hedging''. Initially, Whitlam was successful. Unemployment was reduced to a more normal 1.3 per cent by 1974. However, as the effects of the 1973 oil crisis worked their way through the international economy, unemployment in Australia rebounded to more than 4 per cent by June 1975.

It was not all Labor's fault. The whole Western world was experiencing the new phenomenon of ''stagflation'', with inflation and unemployment both rising sharply.

Policymakers were in a bind. If they tried to reduce unemployment, they stoked the already high inflation. And if they focused on reducing inflation, they increased the already high unemployment. It was in these circumstances that the goal of full employment gradually slipped off Labor's agenda. As historian Frank Crowley observed, ''politicians became accustomed to a notion which would once have appalled them - an 'acceptable level' of unemployment''.

At the same time, there was a rising tide of criticism of the unemployed workers themselves, as if they were the architects of their plight. In 1974, the term ''dole bludger'' was introduced into political discourse by Liberal politicians.

For a time, Labor remained passionate about helping the unemployed. At the 1977 election, when unemployment was trending towards 7 per cent, opposition leader Whitlam pledged to ''reverse the deepening trend to higher and higher unemployment''. His election advertisements promised voters that the ALP would ''Get Australia working''. It was his political swansong.

By the time of the next election, Labor leader Bill Hayden portrayed full employment more as an ideal than a practical possibility. ''Every Australian must have the right to a job,'' declared Hayden. ''That is a principle we cannot, and will not, abandon.'' However, he did not say when it might be achieved. ''It won't be easy, and it won't be quick. But it must be attempted,'' he said. In effect, it was becoming Labor's new ''light on the hill'', the party's distant and unattainable goal. Soon, it would not even be that.

By the time Labor returned to power under Bob Hawke in 1983, the goal of full employment was more distant than ever. More than 10 per cent of workers were then unemployed. Although Hawke was desperate to get the figure down, it was like chasing a mirage. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were created, but the increasing entry of women into the workforce ensured that it was never sufficient. By 1989, 5.6 per cent of the workforce was still unemployed. That was as good as it was going to get. The recession of the early 1990s saw unemployment bounce back to more than 10 per cent. After a decade of hard work, it was back to square one.

It was in this context that the government of Paul Keating gave the Reserve Bank its independence and the responsibility for getting inflation down. The single-minded focus on inflation seemed to make sense in the circumstances.

Twenty years on, inflation has become a distant memory. Unfortunately, full employment is an even more distant memory.

Neither Labor nor Liberal politicians are willing to hold out hope for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who remain unemployed or underemployed. And neither party is willing to speak up for the many school leavers who will soon be joining them.

A level of 5 per cent unemployment has become the new normal. Curtin and Chifley would be appalled.

Now that inflation is firmly under control, it should not be too much to expect that the Labor Party commit itself once again to a policy of full employment.

David Day has written biographies of John Curtin and Ben Chifley and is writing a biography of Paul Keating.